The Salmon Domus as a Site of Mediation

Marianne E. Lien and John Law’s chapter on salmon aquaculture provides a particularly interesting case with which to think about what constitutes a house, more specifically, what work is needed to hold the «house» of fish together. As Lien and Law point out, even if the netting of the pens holds the salmon more or less in place, it performs rather poorly as a boundary in other respects: Sea-lice flow in and out; there are many microbes that cohabit the salmon domus, not to mention the humans that intervene. Lien and Law show how the salmon domus works as a “mediator” for knowing about and accommodating beings that are essentially different from humans – “we are nearly always apart, separated by the water surface,” they write. Drawing upon new work on domestication in anthropology combined with material-semiotic perspectives in science and technology studies (STS), they are able to extend our conceptions and ideas of housing, what it can do , and how housing practices continues to mark turns in human and animal history of domestication.